2nd Annual Spookey Month: Hoppy Halloween!

Some stories just stick with you.  Take "Hopping Down the Bunny Trail" from DC's Unexpected #202 (1980), for example.  I read this in a supermarket in Brevard, North Carolina, while visiting my grandparents.  On Easter, three ordinary kids die at the fangs of human-sized, talking rabbit they mistake for the Easter Bunny, their only crimes gleefully biting the heads off chocolate bunnies and being slightly dim-witted.  It gave me the creeps in broad daylight, and while I didn't buy the comic, it never completely left my thoughts.  Through the years, I'd occasionally remember it, slightly altered over time thanks to the transformative power of an imperfect mind.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who found it impressive, because someone made it into neat little .pdf with a short analysis.  Finally, after 30 years, I was able to read it again.  It's still a nasty little tale that should have wider acclaim. 

Some horror tales-- especially the ones in those old EC comics, the early Creepy and Eerie magazines and most of DC's titles-- rely on an ironic twist where some jerky moron gets his or her comeuppance.  The philandering murderer can't get rid of the betrayed spouse, even in rotted corpse form; the abusive parent suffers a more horrific version of the abuse heaped on the child; the greedy boss hoists himself by his own petard, usually fatally; the blowhard suffers blowback; the foolhardy self-appointed expert destroys himself and those who foolishly believe in him.  No matter what gruesomeness occurs, we're usually reassured in some way that cosmic justice has been served, scales have been balanced and the underlying order has been reaffirmed.  We get a kick out of what happens at least partially because these stories play into our sense of moral superiority.

But in this Michael Uslan-scripted story, the worst you can say about the characters is they're all a little dim-witted and unimaginative. The parents fail in their responsibility to protect their children because they just assume the city's somehow behind the Easter egg hunt that's been completely unpublicized until colorful signs appear overnight. Sure, it's at the local haunted house, which is probably firetrap or at the very least a tetanus shot and a lawsuit just waiting to happen. Send the kids!

These jokers are pretty blase, aren't they? This was the era before the ominously narrated news stories intended to stoke every parent's more morbid prescient fantasies, before 9/11, the anthrax letters, terror alerts and Dateline NBC and Inside Edition. This was two years before the Chicago Tylenol poisonings. And yet as we've seen so many times, even today's supposedly hyper-vigilant adults slip up. They leave kids locked in daycare vans in the middle of summer, fail to recognize or simply ignore the warnings signs before school massacres, leave the gate to the backyard swimming pool unlocked. Even if they're frequently driven to complete paranoia by stories about Internet perverts, Satanic cults and poisoned candy, they-- just like the parents in this story-- can be lulled into complacency by the promise of colorful eggs and treats for the kids.  After all, nothing bad ever happens on holidays!

The kids are pretty dull themselves. They walk right up to the "Old Krieger Place" despite Tenny Henson's having drawn storm clouds looming over it menacingly. I suppose their imaginations have been dulled by too much mediocre television and brain-rotting Saturday morning cartoons. Here's a human-sized talking rabbit and rather than recognize something completely bizarre and even threatening about it-- shoot, some kids bawl at the sight of Santa Claus-- these little chocolate lovers just assume it's Old Man Snyder in a costume. That's some costume! To sweeten the deal, the Easter Bunny offers toys and candy. If that isn't a tip-off, I don't know what is. But these numbskull kids take the offer at face value.

They only start to wise up when the other kids vanish and they find themselves all alone in a perfectly creepy house. And then only a little. They're so confident that everything's fine, that they're going to grow up and go to college and get married and have kids just like themselves one day.  And should something bad happen, Mom and Dad will be right there to save them.  Right?

Well, the universe doesn't really work that way.  Not only to bad things happen to good people, horrors beyond horrors happen to them.  Cars and planes crash, nuclear plants leak, cancers strike, young dudes accept odd jobs from John Wayne Gacy.  In the face of the ongoing tragedy we call living, we'd love to believe someone benevolent is in charge, that there's some underlying order to it.  Certainly there are natural laws and forces at work.  We can calculate the orbit of the earth around the sun with precision because we've figured the most obvious of them out.  But they also guide bombs onto blameless schools and hospitals and bullets into innocent spines.

Some horror stories offer a glimpse of a universe of limitless chaos where we are all in immediate danger.  They tell us order is an illusion, that good intentions invite catastrophe.  People are punished far out of proportion to their wrongs, or become victims of circumstance.  You bite the head off a chocolate rabbit.

A demonic rabbit bites off your head.  Note the complete lack of gore.  Just a transition from the brightly colored world of a sunny Easter Sunday to a dark and stormy place where wicked things happen to kids because they and their parents are careless and sort of dumb.  When I was 12, I could easily imagine myself as one of these dopey kids.  I was a dopey kid.  "Hopping Down the Bunny Trail" lifted the lid off the field and revealed something much better hidden.  And that was terrifying.

Now close the comic and try to sleep.  Happy Halloween!

No! I can't leave you on a downbeat note like that. Here's Spookey to cheer you up again and reassure you the world's a loving place!

2nd Annual Spookey Month: Happy Halloween!

I've got one more horror comic post in the pipe, but I haven't had time to finish it yet. Later this afternoon! In the meantime, here are a few more of those delightful Tales of Terror videos. First up: a spooky sleep-over!



Looks like another of those ubiquitous school trips. Japanese students go on these excursions each year. Some stay within Japan, like these unfortunate girls, and others go abroad. Do you think this experience will cure Yuki of her school trip insomnia?

Here's yet another school trip.



Most school trips are meant to be educational experiences. From this one, I learned that if I leave my lip cream in the bathroom, I should just wait until morning to retrieve it.

Of course, terror doesn't confine itself to creepy old ryokan in the middle of the night. Sometimes it sneaks up on you around lunchtime in ordinary city apartments.



That was a lovely little flat. Didn't the sister decorate it nicely? Love the dot motif, but it's too bad about the visitor problem.

Well, there are dozens of those Tales of Terror on YouTube. But there are very few Spookey ones. Here's a favorite of mine:



Happy Halloween!

2nd Annual Spookey Month: Bernie Wrightson takes on H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is strange case. His influence in horror literature is undeniable and yet he was a pretty lousy writer. When you hear one of his stories described or read a synopsis, it sounds exciting, weird and even a little frightening. Malevolent elder gods from beyond Pluto manipulating scholars into plumbing the depths of forbidden knowledge, whispering aliens hiding in the dark forested hills of Lovecraft's native New England states, a city where the inhabitants are devolving into amphibians. Then you actually read it and the experience is like tediously climbing a steep hill made up of adjectives, exclamation marks and racism. And still they fascinate me.

Comic book adaptations of his works are bit easier to take. Skilled writers eliminate the excesses and hone in on the things Lovecraft did well, and when the artist is Richard Corben or Bernie Wrightson-- someone with real imagination and the rendering chops to provide appropriately chilling visuals-- the results often transcend the source material. "Cool Air" is one of Lovecraft's shorter works and heavily derivative of Edgar Allen Poe, but those are two points in its favor. Two points in favor of the comic book version are the script and art by Wrightson, whose vision meshes so well with Lovecraft's he produces a horror fan's delight. A true classic.

It's not one of Lovecraft's mythological tales. There is no Cthulhu and no Yog-Sothoth, just a simple situation that plays itself out to its logical-- but unfortunately predictable-- conclusion. And while it's not scary by any means, Wrightson's expert adaptation make it worthwhile anyway. Lovecraft allows his rather gentlemanly prose to become a bit vague during the final scene, despite his narrator's insistance that "[b]lack terror, however, preceded me" and his use of florid adjectives like "hellish" and "nauseous," characteristic of his writing when he's really straining for effect. Wrightson just shows us, creating a shock Lovecraft might have appreciated while deploring its directness.

This story first appeared in Eerie #62 (1975), and you can see Cousin Eerie's apparently decapitated head serving as a candlestick holder there on the title page. These color images are from Berni Wrightson: Master of the Macabre #2 (1983), which is where I first read it. That comic also contains the infamous "Jenifer," which frightened me so badly I didn't sleep for two nights. You can't ask much more from a comic book than a sleepless night or two. I'm sure H.P. Lovecraft would agree.  Dark Horse just published a volume collecting Wrightson's Warren work and it includes both of those stories.  I don't own it yet, but be assured I will.  Oh yes, I will!

I wonder what Lovecraft would have thought of this:

2nd Annual Spookey Month: What does Halloween have to do with the Banana Splits?

And comic books for that matter? Nothing, really. But since I go on a Spookey kick every Halloween, I thought you might enjoy comparing their cover of "The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana)," the theme song to The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, to the original and the versions by the Dickies and Liz Phair. Here's the original:



And here's the circa 1979 cover by the Dickies. They upped the tempo a bit for that punk rock feel:



Liz Phair and Material Issue covered it in 1995 and this was the result:



And here's a live performance by Spookey:



I wish that video had better sound quality. Their rendition of the song from their Shakin Pop 'n' Roll album sounds a lot better. Not really surprising, considering the whole "recorded in a studio" versus the "recorded onto some person's digital camera" thing, right?  Their take owes a great deal to the Dickies's version, especially with the nearly incomprehensible verse sections. The studio cut is especially hilarious because you can actually hear them not really give a damn about what they're singing. They make the barest effort to enunciate, instead putting all of their energy into simply having fun with a ridiculous song.

Yes, I know the Dickies version was used in the movie Kick-Ass.  While researching this little article I forced myself to watch that particular scene-- you can find it on YouTube if you haven't already seen it.  While using this song was an inspired choice, the overall effect was lost on me.  I didn't find the crude language or the over-the-top violence offensive; it just struck me as a dumbed-down version of much cooler fare.  Voice courtesy Dirty Harry Callahan, cursing from your junior high locker room, setting from Pulp Fiction, fight choreography and editing nicked from Hong Kong cinema, gore from Kill Bill Vol. 1.  Watching it made me feel like I'd stepped on a soiled diaper with my bare foot and did nothing to convince me to read the comic or watch the rest of the movie.  I'd rather just listen to Spookey-- their cover predates the movie-- or watch this:



Didn't see that coming, did you? Hey, I'll shoot straight with you-- neither did I!

2nd Annual Spookey Month: Disney's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Ah! Now that's some good Halloween-ing. The mellow voice of Bing Crosby, the delightful prose of Washington Irving and some of Disney's finest scene designs and animation. The autumnal backgrounds are also quite lovely to look at-- Mary Blair did some of the color styling on this film, and they look very similar to her work.  This short was originally the second part of the 1949 anthology film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, but I don't think I've ever seen it in that format. In fact, I doubt I've ever seen the Mr. Toad part of the film at all, although I once did go on the Disney World ride based on it.



Some nice cartoony slapstick business that doesn't interfere too much with Irving's comedically formal prose.  And I love Crosby's droll delivery.



The climactic chase is a masterpiece of design, rising tension and animated action. They pull out all the stops to create suspense. Credits for Ichabod and Mr. Toad list three directors: Jack Kinney, Clyde Geronomi and James Algar. That makes it difficult for an animation neophyte like myself to praise the efforts of any one person. And don't forget the actual animators, layout artists and background painters responsible for these eerily effective and yet still hilarious visuals.  They're too numerous to list, but the supremely talented Blair contributed some amazing conceptual paintings and Disney greats Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston (they were best friends, which warms my heart to no end), John Lounsbery and Wolfgang Rietherman supervised or else actually did the animation for this sequence; they're listed as directors of animation for these characters.  Reitherman's Headless Horseman is especially impressive.  What a menacing character throughout!

I've tried to be as thorough in my ignorance of this stuff-- I like to watch 'em, I don't make 'em-- as I could, but some super scholar or animation pedagogue to rival Ichabod himself may feel free to set me straight on this if I've gotten any of it wrong. Even if I react much like Brom Bones.

The sound design matches the imagery for impressive creativity (so much so Tim Burton later referenced it in his own Sleepy Hollow), while Crosby's narration is brilliant in the way he drops the vocal twinkle employed in the earlier, purely comedic sequences and becomes mournfully atmospheric; it's almost as if a beloved uncle-- well-known for his masterful storytelling-- is relating Ichabod's fate, employing every vocal tool at his disposal. Disney's take on Irving's story is the finest version of this often-adapted tale, the one all others attempt to measure up to and fall short by varying degrees. What doesn't fall short of anything, anywhere, is this Halloween-themed performance video featuring Spookey, inspiration of my annual Spookey Month. I know I've posted this one before but it's sooooooo good!

2nd Annual Spookey Month: Disney's The Great Cat Family

Look familiar? It's a 1956 Disney short illustrating the history of cats, introduced by Uncle Walt himself from the comfortable confines of a studio set made to look like a handsome book-filled study. Like all good Halloween stories, it begins in Ancient Egypt. But the most memorable part takes place in Europe at a somewhat later date. Watch...



You may remember an excerpt from the second video as part of A Disney Halloween, a TV special that aired in the 1980s and 1990s. I used to look forward to it every year in October in no small part because of this mysterious scene.  I had no idea what movie or cartoon it came from and I researched it on and off for years, until some nice person at a message board devoted to obscure Disney animation finally clued me in and ended my torment.

The Disney artists did a knock out job with this one-- it features some gorgeous animation with lots of creepy mood, and a wonderfully melodramatic narration. I'll never forget the dark, hand-like clouds clutching at the full moon on a stormy, wind-swept night, the shadowy traveler making his way through the cobblestone streets of a medieval town in the rain and the look of sheer terror on the old woman's face when her cat freaks out: "For night was the time of evil spirits."

In lieu of Spookey, please accept this offering of more Toy Missile as a musical Halloween treat.  This performance took place just behind Shinjuku Station.  And I was there!  Sadly, their official website seems to have vanished... which leads me to believe they exist now only in my memories.  And a few YouTube videos.

2nd Annual Spookey Month: Enjoy some Japanese horror shorts because I don't feel like writing some long, involved post about Halloween today!

That's a pretty lousy elevator. I don't think I'd enjoy riding that one, either. I rode some creepy elevators during my time in Japan, but I was lucky in that I never had that poor girl's experience. Nice job with those English subtitles by "montecristo73returns," though. What else can we find? How about this one?




Lesson learned? Cram school sucks! Again, great job on the subtitles. But if you stay out of elevators and cram schools, you're completely safe, right?



Yikes! That looks a lot like my old apartment! Nice job, KuljeetChauhan. I have no idea where these short films come from. Shown on television? From a DVD? They're pretty cool and there seem to be dozens of them. Now... here's a movie I made. You may have seen it before!